Emilie Zoey Baker is an award-winning poet and spoken word performer who has performed and been published nationally and internationally. In this Lunchbox/Soapbox polemic, she energetically responds to Christopher Bantick’s article, ‘Only greatness, not popular appeal, can restore poetry as the nation’s memory’, published in The Australian in July 2011.

Railing against Bantick’s insistence on a rarefied artform characterised by its traditional masters and other arguments he makes against slam, Baker contends that only by celebrating poetry in all its forms will poets continue to cultivate, entertain and enrich audiences.